Speakers include Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inauguration poet and Education Ambassador of the Academy of American Poets, and Michael Hussey, National Archives Museum Program Manager.

Primarily Teaching Summer Workshops for Educators

Join us to conduct research with original documents in the holdings of the National Archives and Presidential Libraries. Discover some of those incredible teachable documents that help educators and students unlock the past and create online learning activities!

Join the National Archives and Historypin for a free educator workshop on Wednesday, June 21st tolearn about our new World War I app: Remembering WWI.

Remembering WWI is an iPad and Android app for exploring, collaborating, and engaging with our extensive collection of WWI photographs and moving images. It commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War, and is available in the iTunes and Google Play stores.

In this how-to session, we’ll introduce the ways the app has been designed to help teachers and students explore, use, and reuse newly digitized WWI photographs and moving images.

John Bull, the mascot of the 77th Aero Force (Photograph 165-WW-472A-049, National Archives Identifier 45274232)

National Archives staff, along with our partners at Historypin, will highlight the primary source content featured in the app. And you’ll get a chance to explore the app and brainstorm with fellow teachers and curators about ways to use this app in your classroom or cultural heritage institution.

We hope you can join us for a fun workshop (pastries and coffee will be provided) to learn about the ways you might use some of our nation’s most interesting WWI content in your curriculum.

Please bring an iPad (minimum requirements iOS 9) or Android tablet (minimum requirements Android 5, minimum width 4.3 inches) if you own one, and have the Remembering WWI app downloaded if you can. We’ll have a few tablets available for use.

No group in the United States has been in conflict with European ideas of government longer than Native People. Many of these ideas reflect differing and competing world-views. This is a common problem facing all people at all times – including students in the classroom.

With this in mind, we’ve developed a few lessons to help students understand the necessary steps for understanding and dealing with conflicting opinions.

After comparing these, students read, debate, and decide upon an open-ended fictional story such as the one below. Students could also be encouraged to write their own stories with undecided and potentially conflicting endings to debate in class, involving whatever subject they’re currently studying.

Peace or Diamonds?

Plant People – A beautiful jar containing a special plant is owned by a group of people who have had it for hundreds of years. When the plant was originally planted in the jar, (which had a bulbous bottom and a narrow top) diamonds were thrown in the bottom of the pot, then dirt, then a seed was planted. It was placed in a special room in the town and carefully cared for. The plant took a very, very long time to grow, but after about a hundred years it was discovered that just sitting in the same room with it made people who were sick become well again. People who were arguing came into the room and could quickly figure out solutions to their problems. Occasionally water dripped from the leaves, which when looked into could help them see the future.

Travelers – A long time later, a group having about five times as many people as the Plant People came to that place. They were very poor. They had no homeland because there had been a great war and their side had lost. They had eaten all the food they had brought with them and they were extremely hungry. Their clothes were ragged and they were very cold.

The Plant People were kind and fed them dinner, but didn’t have enough food to feed them all winter. In order to be kind, the Plant People took one of the Travelers into the room with the plant to help them figure out what to do about their situation. None of the Travelers had ever seen any plant like that before, but they thought it was silly and superstitious to rely on a plant to heal them or help them make a decision. Later, one of the Plant People told one of the Travelers about the diamonds in the bottom of the pot and how it was believed the diamonds were part of the magic.

The leader thought about how many people he could feed with the diamonds and how shoes he could buy. His people were cold and the children were hungry. They had no money to buy the plant, but they offered to buy it anyway. They were told it couldn’t be bought or sold. It had always been there and that was where it needed to stay.

For more information about the Honoring Tribal Legacies handbook and curriculum and how they can be adapted to your classroom, attend our free webinar on Monday, June 5th at either 7 p.m. Eastern or 7 p.m. Pacific.Email us to register.

For more information about creating your own DocsTeach activities to help students understand the nature of conflict, watch our distance learning page for upcoming professional development opportunities.

Join us for a free professional development webinar on Monday, June 5th at 7 p.m. or 10 p.m. EDT to learn quick and easy ways to incorporate the Honoring Tribal Legacies Handbook into your curriculum.

Honoring Tribal Legacies, underwritten by the National Park Service, introduces many unique Native American viewpoints. It builds upon the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which was observed from 2003 to 2006.

The curriculum promises to expand your students’ modern cultural understandings, while also greatly informing their study of westward expansion.

Join University of Oregon researcher Dr. Stephanie Wood, editor and major contributor to the Honoring Tribal Legacies Handbook, and National Archives educator Carol Buswell, one of the designers of the seven Honoring Tribal Legacies teaching units.

We offer a one-hour National Archives Professional Development certificate for attending. Some school districts and libraries accept these certificates for required PD credit. Be sure to check with your district in advance.

Suitable for all grade levels. To register, email us at distancelearning@nara.gov

We’re happy to share some recent improvements we’ve made to DocsTeach.org, our online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives!

New Analyzing Documents Tool

We’re very excited about our first new activity tool since we launched DocsTeach almost seven years ago!

Create activities with the Analyzing Documents tool to teach students the process of document analysis:

Meet the document.

Observe its parts.

Try to make sense of it.

Use it as historical evidence.

Analyzing Documents activities guide students through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to extract information to make informed judgments. Read more about this tool — or jump right in by creating a new activity and choosing Analyzing Documents as your activity type. Choose the type of document (photograph,
written document, artifact, poster, map, cartoon, video, or sound recording) to set analysis questions for your students.

Managing Students’ Responses

We listened to educators who told us they wanted to use DocsTeach with their students, but weren’t interested in receiving an email every time one of their students completed an activity.

Now you can view your students’ completed activities on the My Students’ Responses page. You can even create groups to organize your students’ work — students will choose from the groups that you set up when they finish their activities. And you can use the new My Response Settings page to turn off email notifications entirely if you’d like.

To test out this feature or change your settings, log in and choose My Account in the menu.

Better Searches

We’ve drastically improved search functionality so that you can more easily find the primary sources and activities that you’re looking for. Now when you search for Vietnam War, for example, you’ll only get results that have both the words Vietnam and War. But we included other options, so you can pick the type of search that you prefer.

We also changed how our search works so that you get the most relevant results first. Searching Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, gives you the actual Act first, followed by documents related to the topic.

Recently Added Documents

As always, we’ve been adding more primary sources – here are some recent highlights, documents from two Supreme Court cases:

Buck v. Bell – This newly digitized case file concerns the issue of involuntary sterilization and can help students learn about the eugenics movement in the United States. Read more about the case in another recent blog post.

Worcester v. Georgia – This case established the principle of “tribal sovereignty.” The Supreme Court ruled that states, like Georgia, could not diminish rights of tribes because the Cherokee Nation constituted a nation holding distinct sovereign powers as granted by Congress and the United States.

…and more

We’ve made additional behind-the-scenes updates to improve the overall DocsTeach experience. We hope these changes will make the site easier to use, and an even better tool for bringing history to life. But we always love to hear feedback — so let us know if you have an idea to improve DocsTeach!

Teaching the Vietnam War through Documents, Photography, and Poetry
July 12-14, 2017
National Archives, Washington, DC

Soldiers resting during a search and destroy mission against the Viet Cong (From the Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer)

The National Archives and the Academy of American Poets have partnered to produce a dynamic summer teacher workshop on the subject of the Vietnam War. The workshop will explore our past and present relationship with this conflict and the struggle for peace.

During this workshop, historians, poets, and art educators will guide participants through techniques for teaching about the Vietnam War.

These methodologies will employ three types of source material: 1) primary source documents from the holdings of the National Archives; 2) historical photographs, and 3) poetry. Each provides a different means of getting closer to the truth(s) of the conflict.

A newly digitized Supreme Court Case file can help students learn about the eugenics movement in the United States and its impact on one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions: Buck v. Bell.

In his nearly 30 years in the Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was known for his effective use of language in both his opinions and dissents. Considered by some scholars to be the finest philosophical mind and greatest legal scholar on the bench (and one of its most-cited members), his language in defense of free speech is noted for its eloquence and progressive thinking.

“If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”– United States v. Schwimmer

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”– Schenck v. United States

His opinion in the case of Carrie Buck v. John Hendren Bell, Superintendent of State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded stands in stark contrast with the phrase: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The supposed “imbecile” in question was Carrie Buck, by then a 21-year-old woman from Charlottesville, Virginia. At the age of 17, Carrie Buck became pregnant, which was later reported to have been the result of rape, allegedly by a relative of her foster parents. Following the birth of her child, Carrie was committed to the “Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded” (the same institution that housed Carrie’s birth mother, Emma Buck) on the grounds of “feeble-mindedness.”

Around that time, Virginia’s legislature had just passed a new law calling for “the sterilization of mental defectives.” Passed during the height of the eugenics movement in the United States, this law stated that sterilization would promote “both the health of the individual patient and the welfare of society.”

Selection of Virginia Sterilization Act

The superintendent of the Virginia Colony, Dr. Albert S. Priddy, chose Carrie Buck to be the first test case of the legality of this new statute. In his filed Petition, Priddy evaluated her as “unfit to exercise the proper duties of motherhood” due to her “anti-social conduct and mental defectiveness.” However, he believed that if sterilized, her “good physical health and strength” meant she could leave the Colony and “enjoy the liberty and blessings of outdoor life [and] become self-supporting.”

Selection from the Petition of A.S. Priddy

After several hearings and state court decisions that upheld the Virginia law, Buck v. Bell (for Dr. John H. Bell, who succeeded Priddy as Superintendent following his death) reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927.

Several people who knew Carrie Buck directly also testified during the earlier court proceedings. Most of this testimony comes from doctors, nurses, and social workers. Anne Harris, a nurse from Charlottesville, describes in her testimony an incident involving Carrie passing notes in school of an “anti-social” character.

Selection from the Testimony of Anne Harris

Ms. Harris also describes Carrie’s mother Emma as “feeble-minded” and a “socially inadequate person” who was supported by charity, living in the worst neighborhoods and unable to support her children.

Several of the accounts included in the Supreme Court record from earlier proceedings come from people that had never actually met Carrie. A trio of teachers provided testimony about the behavior and aptitude of Carrie’s relatives (notably absent was testimony from any of Carrie’s teachers). In her testimony, Eula Wood, a teacher from Earlysville, Virginia, discusses Doris Buck, Carrie’s half-sister. Ms. Wood describes Doris as “dull in her books” and describes demoting her to first grade.

Virginia Landis, a teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia, is asked about a George Dudley, another relative of Carrie Buck. In her testimony, Virginia (who testified that she did not “know Carrie Buck at all”) describes George as “dull-minded” who was “slow in grasping things in school.”

Selection from Testimony of Virginia Landis

Likewise, another teacher, Virginia Beard, describes Roy Smith (Carrie’s supposed half-brother) as “below the grade of other boys his age” (he was currently in the 4th grade at the age of fourteen) and one who “tried to be funny–tried to be smart.”

Though these testimonies might sound irrelevant to the specific case of Carrie Buck, during the height of eugenics beliefs in the United States, this was evidence that proved Carrie’s condition was due to an inheritance of inferior traits. This and other similar details could let Justice Holmes state that three generations of imbeciles were enough.

Several months following Holmes’s opinion and the Supreme Court decision that upheld the Virginia Sterilization Act, Dr. John H. Bell performed Buck’s sterilization by salpingectomy (removal of the Fallopian tubes) on October 19, 1927. She was the first person involuntarily sterilized under Virginia’s law for the sterilization of persons considered “unfit.” An estimated 8,300 Virginians were sterilized under the state law, which was in effect until 1972.

Over 20 selections from this recently digitized Supreme Court case are now available by searching the phrase “Buck v. Bell” on DocsTeach.

This case file was recently digitized in the National Archives’ Innovation Hub due, in large part, to efforts by the National Archives employee affinity group “disABILITY.”

We invite students, teachers, and families to join us — and some of your favorite authors and illustrators — for a free summer writing festival at the National Archives!

Friday, July 7 and Saturday, July 8 we’ll host The “Write” Stuff with workshops and a family day at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC.

Select events will be live-streamed or available via webinar for those who can’t make it in person.

Friday, July 7

Be a Writer Day for Participants in Grades 4-6, free admission, registration required

Join us in person, online through YouTube, or via webinar for an exciting day. Highlights include:

10:30 am – noon: Discussion and Q&A with notable authors and illustrators of Young Adult and Children’s Literature: John Hendrix, Syl Sobel, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Jacqueline Jules, and Tonya Bolden. Moderated by Kitty Felde, host of the podcast “Book Club for Kids.” Live-streamed on YouTube.

12:15 – 12:45 pm: Book signings by featured authors

2 – 4:15 pm: Author-led hands-on workshops. Read the list of breakout sessions on the registration page. The session Making Fiction from Facts will be available via webinar. Registration required; participants will receive a link to join the webinar via email the week of the program.

The $100 fee includes all materials. Graduate credit may be available for an additional fee. Participants will receive a stipend upon completion.

Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum

Elementary Summer Teacher Institute July 24-29

Join the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum for a week of learning about American Presidents, Iowa Territorial Government, Iowa History, Voting, Citizenship, and how to incorporate primary sources into your elementary classroom. We will complete workshops geared towards understanding the new Iowa Social Studies Standards and incorporate them into building lesson plans and classroom activities. All teachers will submit an assignment for completion of graduate credit.

Other PD from the National Archives

Please note that waitlist applications are being accepted for the Primarily Teaching summer workshop at the National Archives in Washington, DC (July 24-28) to explore women’s rights through archival materials.

Primarily Teaching workshops are made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation, through the support of Texas Instruments.

Today’s post about a new activity for school-age visitors comes from Education and Public Programs intern Elise Paisant.

Are you looking for a hands-on educational activity for your students to do while visiting the National Archives in Washington, DC?

Our new gallery packs, designed with students and families in mind, provide activities for each of our permanent museum exhibits. Students can even wear an archivist’s stack coat to complete their experience!

Groups of students, led by a chaperone, can use the packs to explore the museum and learn about the National Archives and the records we hold.Students will walk away with a stronger understanding of why we preserve Government records for the American people, and of our country’s formation.

Using the gallery packs, students will practice three main skills: observation, document analysis, and critical thinking.

The activities in the packs require students to look closely at our permanent exhibits and analyze for themselves the primary source documents that they see.

Each exhibit has multiple activities designed to engage students in hands-on learning. The activities in each pack include:

“Kids in the Archives” in the Record of Rights exhibit: Analyze primary sources from or about kids and reflect on how those documents influenced America.

“Kids in the Archives” in the Public Vaults exhibit: Analyze documents connected to kids and reflect on their impact.

Public Vaults Image Search: Use small detailed cropped segments of larger images to find the complete versions.

“Constitutional Quest” in the Public Vaults: Determine which primary source best matches up with parts of the Constitution’s preamble, then identify items from students’ own lives that also fit the theme.

Faulkner Murals in the Rotunda: Learn about a few of the men involved with the creation of the Declaration and Constitution.

“Parchment and the Big Three” in the Rotunda: Learn about the materials that our founding documents were written on and how they are preserved at the National Archives.

Letter to the President in the Public Vaults: Examine letters to the President and write a letter on provided National Archives stationary to take home and mail.

While some activities appear oriented for older students, most can be modified to accommodate younger students.

Your students can begin their archival adventure today using our gallery packs! Pick them up in our Boeing Learning Center, open Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. A group chaperone must provide a driver’s license in order to check them out.